The 2010 Bossies (Best of Open Source Software) awards were announced last week, and among the winners is the open source search technology Apache Solr. This prestigious award recognizes the best open source software for businesses every year, identifying the “most promising and cost-effective products available to IT organizations”. Being recognized alongside other highly-acclaimed products like Alfresco, Drupal and WordPress only signifies Solr’s maturity as an enterprise-class platform.

As the amount of digital content continues to increase during the daily operations of an organization, it becomes evermore important to implement an effective enterprise search tool to sort through and find relevant content. Over the past few years, Apache Lucene and Solr has taken the enterprise search industry by storm as it continues to gain visibility for its highly-scalable and robust search platform. It’s now being downloaded thousands of times per day, with over 4,000 enterprise customers, which include AT&T, Macy’s, and Verizon.

“With its recognition as the best of open source for 2010, it’s no surprise to us that Solr has emerged as a disruptive catalyst to mission-critical data-driven applications across the marketplace,” said Eric Gries, CEO of Lucid Imagination. “The community’s virtuous cycle of adoption and innovation deserves tremendous credit for this achievement, and so we offer our congratulations for this well-deserved recognition. Thousands of companies are gaining competitive advantage from the use of this innovative software, and this award further confirms that diverse and widespread adoption of Solr open source enterprise search is well established.”

As a Lucid Imagination partner and a long time integrator of Lucene and Solr search technologies, Rivet Logic is excited for the Solr community for this accomplishment.

2010 is off to an exiting start for Rivet Logic so far with lots of stuff going on. Here’s what’s been keeping us busy recently….

A couple weeks ago, we officially released the JSP and Spring MVC versions of Crafter rivet, the open source Web content delivery framework we originally launched back in September of 2009. As part of our continuing commitment towards the open source community, we decided to build and expand upon the existing feature set of Crafter, to accommodate both JSP and Spring MVC based Web applications.

Last week marked our official launch of our near-shore software development facility down in Costa Rica. Although the Costa Rica center has been in operation since last year, it has only recently expanded to make near-shore services readily available to our customers.

Today, we’ll be participating as a panelist on open source CMS for a local DC WCM Meetup group meeting. The meeting is open to all, so if you’re in the area, swing by!

KMWorld, the leading information provider serving the knowlege, document, and content management systems market, is featuring their “Top 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management” list in its March 2010 issue. This year, Rivet Logic was selected again, for the second consecutive year, to be part of this prestigious list.

“The firms on this list are true solution providers that are dedicated to understanding what their customers need and delivering elegant technology for the requirements of the knowledge economy.”

We’re excited and honored that the industry is recognizing our efforts in driving successful open source software adoption. Over the past year, as we’ve continued to grow as an organization, we’ve also seen a positive response from organizations as the interest and awareness of open source software continues to increase in the arena of content management and collaboration.

Alfresco is running a 20-city Lunch & Learn series to review the new Enterprise 3.2 release, along with implementation best practices and solution demos.

Rivet Logic will be hosting the Washington DC, Orlando, and Boston Lunch & Learns over the next couple of weeks.

Click here to learn more and to register. We hope to see you there!

Last year, Rivet Logic won the 2008 JBoss Innovator of the Year Award with our Kaplan implementation utilizing Alfresco and JBoss. Can we do it again this year?

JBoss notified us earlier this month of the terrific news that we had been selected as the category winner for the 2009 JBoss Innovation Awards for Optimized Systems for an Alfresco/JBoss implementation we performed for Harvard Business Publishing. But can we repeat what we did last year and take the overall Innovator of the Year Award again? The judge of that will be left up to the voters, so place your vote for Rivet Logic!!

The winner for the 2009 Innovator of the Year Award will be announced at this year’s JBoss World held in Chicago from September 1 - 4. We will be participating, so if you find yourself there, drop by and say hi!!

Today eXo Platform, a leading European open source company, announced the merger of its eXo Portal project with JBoss Portal to create an open source portal platform.

The goal of the new project is to forge a strong portal solution by bringing together the technical strengths of the two projects through the open source community.

According to eXo Platform CEO, Benjamin Mestrallet, “What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals.”

“The eXo portal has some impressive functionality in terms of ease of use, UI flexibility and straightforward management administration; JBoss.org’s current portal project has a robust engine, performance and security features, combined this collaboration project will help drive portal capabilities forward,” said Dr. Mark Little, Sr. Director of Engineering, Middleware at Red Hat.

What does this new portal product mean for other open source portal platforms like Liferay and Plone? Should they be worried? They may want to keep an eye out as eXo is contributing a new project to the JBoss community, eXo JCR, which is a “robust cluster-ready Java Content Repository that is standards based and a key component for the project”. Could this be seen a threat to other portal platforms which lacks the robust content management features that eXo JCR will bring?

It would be interesting to see how the new JBoss eXo portal platform fares with enterprises in their choice of portal and collaboration software.

Looking back on 2008, we’ve seen several trends in the web space. The web has transformed from a place to look for information to a place to share information. Social networking tools and applications exploded, with the release of the Facebook Platform and Google’s OpenSocial. Enterprises also saw an increase in the adoption of collaboration and social networking tools such as blogs, wikis, and LinkedIn.  Mobile web usage became increasing mainstream with Apple’s iPhone 3G and Google’s Android. Open source software gained popularity as the economy took a downturn.

So what’s in store for 2009?

Here are just a few things to watch out for in the coming year…

• Semantic web - what good is information if it can’t be organized? contextual web utilizing semantic technologies will be huge
• Web 2.x - in preparation for Web 3.0, the new wave of “intelligent web”, we will see an increased adoption of technologies such as semantic web, OpenID, and SaaS to name a few
• Cloud computing - will cloud computing gain enough momentum to be the next big thing?
• Facebook domination continues
• Open source continues to gain popularity within the enterprise
• Friend synchronization tools - to help ease the information overload from the social media revolution

Along with millions of Americans, I too watched the election results last night as the gap between Obama and McCain increased and the critical swing states turned blue one by one. While’s it’s apparent that the vast majority of Americans are ready for a change, part of Obama’s election success can be attributed to his modern way of campaigning, utilizing the power of people and technology in a way never done before during during the election process.

Obama’s campaign recruited Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, to build its own social networking site, myBarackObama.com. Talk about harnessing the power of the internet.

“The internet grew from being the medium of a core group of political junkies to a gateway for millions of ordinary Americans to participate in the political process, donating odd amounts of their spare time to their candidate through online campaign tools. Obama’s campaign carefully designed its web site to maximize group collaboration, while at the same time giving individual volunteers tasks they could follow on their own schedules.”

This collaboration of Obama supporters resulted in some creative contributions, such as the Obama ‘08 for iPhone, where social networking features allow users to participate in the campaign process with friends.

This next generation campaign strategy was able to reached out to millions of young voters whose voices might not have been heard otherwise. But by incorporating the technologies that are second nature to this generation into the campaign process, young voters throughout the nation found themselves wanting to take part in this historical landmark event. It wouldn’t be far fetched to say that it’s these young voters who helped convert traditionally republican states like Virginia to vote democratic for the first time in over 40 years.

“It was a peer-to-peer, bottom-up, open-source kind of ethos that infused this campaign,” says Benko, a principal of the political consulting firm Capital City Partners, in Washington, D.C. “Clearly, there was a vision to this.”

It’s undeniable that Barack Obama’s campaign took electioneering to a whole new level, one that harnesses the enthusiasm of his supporters. Needless to say, this landmark election will also serve as a turning point in how election campaigns will be approached in the future.

When people think about social networking, websites like Facebook and MySpace immediately pops to mind. It’s a way for Gen Y’ers to connect with each other for pure entertainment purposes, right? Or is it?

With Web 2.0 already a staple in the consumer web world, Enterprise 2.0 is quickly gaining momentum within businesses and enterprises. Social networking is going beyond teens connecting in cyberspace. It’s about enabling businesses to collaborate and work together as a community, both internally amongst employees and externally with customers and partners. Instant messaging, wikis and blogs are being used as tools to encourage communication, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Facebook is venturing into enterprise applications with the help of Ringside Networks, an application server company, which offers an open source “social application server”. “Ringside Social Application Server is the first open-source platform that enables Web site owners to build and deploy social applications that operate with existing Web site content and business applications while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.”

“It has a range of cool features like the ability to gather ‘social intelligence’. In other words, the Ringside platform allows business owners to gain insight into the social graph of users, relationships, groups, interactions, and sharing that is occurring on their Web site. Suddenly, socializing becomes smart business.”

In fact, investors see so much potential in the future of social networking that a couple of Facebook investors, Accel Capital and The Founders Fund, created the Facebook Fund for start-ups, which “offers grants to new ventures that specifically develop applications using the Facebook Platform.”

How’s that for enterprise social networking??